THE DOUBLE
CRISIS
outcome: the circumstances of taking power, the internal struggle
for influence that is bound to take place as power is consolidated,
the men who are selected to lead.
One additional feature of Gaullism is of supreme interest to me:
it is the first genuinely
new
political reality since Hitler. It has come
into being in France. But if this new reality remains new, and proves
able to break through the present dilemma of traditional capitalism
versus totalitarianism, then it cannot
be
confined within French
borders.
Malraux:
In every country, resistance to Communism takes
on the color given it by the particular spirit of that country. In
Germany, it was Nazism; and with us it is something which looks
like the First Republic.
I said recently, in a meeting at the Velodrome d'Hiver: "The
Stalinists are not the Left, we are not the Right, and the Third Force
is not the Center."
It is beyond dispute that in the field of propaganda the Stalinists
have won the first round against us by convincing so many people
abroad that Gaullism is a movement of the Right. Just how advan–
tageous it is for the Stalinists to create this belief that their most
dangerous enemy, General de Gaulle, is a future fascist, is plain
to everyone.
As
for the Third Force, if we are not the Right, what is the
point of the Third Force? That is why they have to label us reac–
tionaries.
It is really funny to see the man who recreated the French
Republic painted as antirepublican; the man who crushed collabora–
tion, as chief of collaborators; the man who abolished racial laws,
as an anti-Semite; and to find him made out an adversary of women's
suffrage when it was he who instituted women's suffrage in France–
a step somehow neglected by sixty years of Parliaments. It is note–
worthy, furthermore, that those who characterize us as fascists and
reactionaries are the same persons who accuse the United States
of having no other motive than the enslavement of Europe.
I am sure that your readers know by now that the Stalinists
are no longer of the Left. How I should like to overhear the con–
versations between the leather-coated Commissars of the Republic
413
